[Patrick Stickler, Nokia/Finland, (+358 40) 801 9690, patrick.stickler@nokia.com]
----- Original Message -----
From: "ext Brian McBride" <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
To: "Patrick Stickler" <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>; <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>; "ext pat hayes" <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
Sent: 02 November, 2002 13:41
Subject: Re: rdfs:Datatype question
> At 13:08 02/11/2002 +0200, Patrick Stickler wrote:
>
> >IMO, we need rdfs:Datatype to define the set of classes which
> >have the required characteristics for RDF datatyping, namely
> >a lexical space, a value space, and an N:1 mapping from the
> >lexical value space where N > 0.
> >
> >The term rdfs:Datatype is a means to give a name to the set
> >of RDF Classes which exhibit those characteristics.
>
> That is a good point, which I translate as: the model theory may say
> nothing about the meaning of rdfs:Datatype, but would it be useful to
> applications, e.g. for example, knowing that something is a datatype could
> trigger an app to go to its datatype implementation registry and look for
> an implementation. I'm not entirely convinced by that example. Maybe
> Patrick has one.
Sure. The app would go to e.g. the datatyping API at
http://www-nrc.nokia.com/sw/datatypes.zip with the datatype
URI and lexical form to test validity, or compare with
some other value, or to intern the value natively, etc.
Knowing that a URI denotes a member of rdfs:Datatype is
very important for practical organization of such functionality
as Brian points out above.
> Intuitively, it would seem a bit strange to have a concept like the class
> of datatypes and not have a name for it.
Agreed.
Patrick